Soccer Mommy’s Guide to ‘Stardew Valley,’ the Coziest Video Game Ever

Back in October, the Nashville-based musician Sophie Allison—who makes beautiful and brooding indie rock as Soccer Mommy—became the envy of every Stardew Valley fan when she got her own avatar in the video game’s signature SNES style. It was a must if she was going to release “Abigail,” a writing-exercise-turned-single inspired by her preferred love interest—a purple-haired weeb hottie—in the wildly popular farm sim. While preparing her excellent fourth album Evergreen last year, Allison and her team got in contact with Stardew creator Eric Barone early on. “We were originally hoping we could make something together but he didn’t have the time,” Allison tells me by phone. “He gave us permission to use the likeness, and we figured out how to use scenes that are already in the game with another designer.”

Set within Stardew Valley, where stressful city living is traded for rehabbing the family farm and settling into a small town, the song’s video portrays a special heart event—a cutscene where two characters solidify their relationship—for Sophie and Abigail at a rock show. “That’s actually a heart event for the character Sam,” she says. “Sam, Sebastian, and Abigail have a band, and you take a bus to their concert and they give you a shoutout. Sorry to kick you out, Sam, but I thought that’d be really cute for me and Abigail.” 

The clip’s true-to-game details—like knowing that Abigail loves chocolate cake and hanging out in the graveyard at night—made it clear that Soccer Mommy is a serious Stardew fan. And with a highly social game like Stardew, there are various ways to be hardcore that don’t involve a typical mission or sense of competition. “I love the dating aspect,” Allison says. “I know that’s not the point of the game, but as a Gemini, it’s the most fun part for me. I like dating a lot of people in a low stakes kind of way.” 

In that way and so many others, Stardew Valley reminds Soccer Mommy of Harvest Moon, the whimsical ’90s farm sim she adored as a kid. “These kinds of games are really an escape if you’re feeling overwhelmed—I feel this way about Pokémon too,” she adds. “You can just disappear into this little world that’s so positive and nurturing. As much as I loved Harvest Moon, it’s missing an element of deeper characterization that Stardew does so well. I’m not the hugest video game person, but Stardew Valley totally changed what I think a video game can even be.” 

Below, Soccer Mommy and I go deep on the ins and outs of Stardew Valley. Spoilers ahead.

Hearing Things: I have to imagine some of your fans got into the game after the “Abigail” video. If somebody were just starting Stardew, what would be your initial tips? 

Sophie Allison: When you’re first picking your farm, I really love the beach farm. It’s super pretty, and I like having water. I also like the river farm for that reason. When you start the game, spend the first couple days clearing the farm. I think that’s the most important thing, because it gets really annoying and frustrating if you’re starting to do other things and you still have to clear and prep the farm. Wear out your energy. Do the farm. Go meet people—that’s my big tip. Talk to everyone, try to figure out everybody’s likes and interests, just explore and get it all figured out. Then get to work on the community center as quickly as you can.

Do you have a sense of how many hours you’ve logged on the game?

I have no idea because I’ve played on both Xbox and Switch. I’ve been playing it for years, and I’ve gone through a lot of files. My longest-running farm is pretty fleshed out, though. It’s very designed, it’s all super automated, I’ve got my slimes and everything. But honestly, now I spend most of my time on the island. 

Wait, what island?

There’s an island you can get to eventually, like after you finish the community center tasks. You can repair Willy’s boat and he’ll take you to this place called Ginger Island, and there’s more stuff out there to uncover. That’s a fairly recent update. Whenever there’s an update I find myself going back to Stardew, checking out more places. I go through intense phases with it.

It really does become like an event in one’s life, taking over all your free time. 

You know, I go out on tour, and I’m very busy, and I just work and live in tour world, and then I come home and, like, I have no job anymore. And my friends have jobs. So what do I do? I go work on the farm. 

Your job becomes farming. So when I play I’m partial to farming, fishing, and foraging. I’m less into mining and combat. Do you have a preference there? 

I like to do it all, to be honest. I get really into one thing for a minute, and then once I’ve completed some tasks and leveled up, I move on. At a certain point it becomes really easy to check out of farming, because you can make sprinklers for all your watering. I definitely like to get myself set up with that and with animals early on, and try to build that up. But I do like the mines. The one thing I have actually never done on the game in completion is… have you gotten to the desert yet?  

Oh yes, the Calico Desert.

The mine there is hard. I’ve gotten down kind of far in it, but I haven’t done the entire thing because it’s just so draining. My favorite part, really, is dating. If I’m being honest, that’s the best part of the game to me. It’s extremely cute to be able to give people things and figure out what they like. 

It’s funny, when I got back on the dating apps a couple of years ago, I had Stardew Valley in my interests on Hinge, and it became such an entry point for people to ask: Who’s your favorite Stardew spouse? You can kind of glean things about people’s tastes. You have a whole song about Abigail, but if you’re not marrying her in the game, who are you courting? 

I like to marry Sebastian because he’s gone a lot, but I get a little tired of that. Usually I divorce him. Sam was the first one I ever married. I had just started playing, and I didn’t really go talk to a bunch of people. I was just like, oh, he plays music. Even in the game, I don’t know why I gravitated towards that. I’ve married a lot of them and then divorced them really quickly. I like Leah a lot, though. 

I like Leah, too. I like that she’s an artist and she’s always talking about spicy food. 

She’s also the only character in the game where, if you’re playing as a girl she'll already be gay, which is very cool. I like her energy, and there's some drama in her heart events when an ex shows up. I also love Alex, he has a great plotline, though I’ve never played all the way through with him. 

I’m gonna tell you who I don’t like: I don’t connect with Maru at all. A lot of people really love Emily, and I like the character a lot, but similar to Maru, her heart events are just not exciting. They’re too random, and you're not even really involved with a lot of them, which doesn't do it for me. I don’t love Elliott. I just don’t care about whatever he’s got going on, and I feel the same way about Harvey. He bores the hell out of me in a romantic sense. The whole plotline of him like, wanting to fly or something? 

I have to admit, I’m a sucker for a nerd and started off marrying Harvey. But he’s so boring. The only thing he seems to like is wine, so I just give him lots of wine. 

Yeah, he likes coffee too, which makes it pretty easy. I always picked Shane in the beginning, because he has a nice progression. But I didn’t like being married to him. 

Well, is he still an alcoholic? 

When you marry him, he kind of cleans up and has a real passion for the chickens. It’s very endearing.

That’s cute. Do you have a favorite crop or a favorite season? 

Autumn and summer. I truly love pumpkins, even though those do not keep growing. The cactus fruits are kind of cool, and I do blueberries a lot. I try to have variety, try to switch it up so that I can store a lot of different crops. But I’m super into getting milk and making cheese, aging the cheese, aging the wine, making jam, making caviar—all that artisan stuff. 

Have you ever “sold out” and gone the JojaMart route? It’s giving Amazon, obviously. 

I haven’t actually, because it sounds so awful. It also seems like it is not beneficial to you or the town, which I think is a great message. I’ve been thinking, should I do a file where I try this? But I feel like that would not be a file I enjoyed playing for too long. Also, I'm married to the daughter of the general store owner. I can't just be going right to the big-box competition. 

Do you ever feel weird because Abigail lives at home and kind of seems like a teen?

I like to imagine that none of them are teenagers. They’re eligible bachelors. I’m picturing she’s 25 and living at home because she’s kind of a freak who just wants to play video games and drums. She’s a Twitch trainer. She’s like, I’ve got to get out of here because my parents are driving me crazy. 

Also, in Harvest Moon, if you did not marry eligible people, they would marry someone else eventually. Like if you waited too long, everyone would couple off. You could have these—not just heart events for your character, but you had rival heart events as well, where you could see the person you like, having a moment with someone else. That used to boil my blood when I was a child, because I didn’t realize that I was not inside of the video game. I wish Stardew would do that, because I’d love to see my jealousy come out for a video game character again. I need to be like, fighting and conquering over someone. I would never want to do something like that in my real life, but in the video game, I want all the drama. 

Actually, there is a cutscene in Stardew where if you’re dating everyone, you can walk into the bar and they’ll all be mad at you. It lasts a couple days. Or if you’re married and you start giving gifts to someone else of the same gender [as the spouse], they’ll sometimes be like, “I heard you gave a gift to so and so today.”

You’re not the first person who has noted its similarities to Harvest Moon, like urging me to play that if I like Stardew. But I’m hesitant—how could Harvest Moon top this? 

No, you’ve got to wait till you’ve finished Stardew all the way through at least once. If you’re still wanting more, then you can go play Harvest Moon. Particularly, I really love Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, which is for Game Boy Advance. But they actually just released a version of Friends of Mineral Town on Switch. That’s what I played growing up. It’s not obviously as in-depth [as Stardew] but it’s still very cute and there’s plenty to do. But also, you can accidentally kill your animals in Harvest Moon. Like if they’re sick and you don’t care for them, they’ll just die. It’s very sad. There’s a little funeral and the priest chews you out. 

Wow, that’s bleak. Honestly, it’s wild how these kinds of games actually make me appreciate nature more. Stardew’s like the most outside inside-kid game. 

It’s so beautiful. There’s something satisfying about it, partially because it’s so much about tidying and organizing and doing these tasks, but also because the scenery and the music are truly so gorgeous. It can make me feel so nostalgic for being in the mountains, and it’s so comforting because it reminds me of my childhood a lot. 

Do you have any favorite music from Stardew? 

I like the spring and the fall themes on the farm. Those little melodies on a loop are just so catchy and actually have interesting chord progressions. You can get a jukebox at one point and change the music too, which I love. It all sounds very flute-y, almost like jaunty chamber music. Video game music like that is my favorite, like my ringtone is the Harvest Moon opening theme. I just find it really calming and peaceful.